The New Aesthetics

The origin of the New Aesthetics lies in an art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, in 2007 and the joint class held there by the English artist Clive Head and the Anglo-Cypriot writer and art theorist Michael Paraskos. Head and Paraskos had previously taught together at the University of Hull, but had both left academic teaching in 2000, and gone partly their separate ways. The reunion in Irsee resulted in a small pamphlet being published, The Aphorisms of Irsee[1] in which they set out a series of seventy-five aphoristic sayings on the nature of art. Although a number of the sayings are deliberately comic, such as Beware the Swiss bearing sausages, the majority of them assert what the authors believed to be the essential elements of artistic practise. Some of these are also deliberately provocative, such as aphorism 38: Performance is not art: it moves too much and so adds to the flux. Art is always a longed for stasis, which can be set alongside aphorism 37: True art fixes the flux of chaos. That is how we cope with chaos, and that is the purpose of art.[1]